2 Introduction to cosTransactions

The cosTransactions application is a Transaction Service compliant with the OMG
Transaction Service CosTransactions 1.1.

Purpose and Dependencies

cosTransactions is dependent on Orber version 3.0.1 or later(see the Orber
documentation), which provides CORBA functionality in an Erlang environment.

cosTransactions is dependent on supervisor/stdlib-1.7 or later.

Basically, cosTransaction implements a two-phase commit protocol and allows objects running
on different platforms to participate in a transaction.

Prerequisites

To fully understand the concepts presented in the
documentation, it is recommended that the user is familiar
with distributed programming, CORBA and the Orber application.

Recommended reading includes CORBA, Fundamentals and Programming - Jon Siegel and Open Telecom Platform Documentation Set. It is also helpful to have read
Concurrent Programming in Erlang and, for example, Transaction Processing: concepts and techniques - Jim Gray, Andreas Reuter.

Note

The cosTransaction application is compliant with the OMG CosTransactions specification 1.1. Using
other vendors transaction service, compliant with the OMG CosTransactions specification 1.0, may
not work since the 'TRANSACTION_REQUIRED', 'TRANSACTION_ROLLEDBACK' and 'INVALID_TRANSACTION'
exceptions have been redefined to be system exceptions, i.e., used to be transaction-specific ('CosTransactions_Exc').